Lucky 7 Quest Mode mock up screen, wall papers and sleepy ramblings.

Hello,

  How are you?  I hope you are well.

Well it’s been a really hectic week for me, this week.  The day job has been none stop with early starts almost every day.  So when I have been doing game work on the night time, I’ve been half dead (like I am now) and I’ve been making a few stupid mistakes or going off on wild tangents, but it’s not all bad and I do find it fairly relaxing doing the graphics.

  Well you may have noticed that I added a couple of new wall papers to the Lucky 7 page and the logos and full name of the game.  Talking about the name of the game, I’m still not sure if I should stick the GoGo name in to the title or not.  He will be in the game, but that would be one really long title (Gogo Lucky 7: Escape from Monster Island), so I think I will leave it as it is now as it’s already long enough as it is.  It took me almost the whole weekend to get those two wall papers done (along with other little gf/x jobs) as I had to redo the logos again as I didn’t save the original layers (I’m a big, daft, fool for not doing that), but looking on the bright side, I should never need anything as big as the current resolution you on the wall papers.  The main reason for do the wall papers where that I wanted to play with my new copy of LightWave and this was a good excuse and I wanted to show what the overall graphical style for the game is without showing too much of the game off (it actually doesn’t show anything of the game off except for a couple of the monsters in the game).

  Speaking of LightWave, you know how I just bought the upgrade last week (did I mention that (wink)), well I just got an e-mail / advert telling me that because Newtek Europe is now 10 years old and the new official (free) update of LightWave V9.6 has just come out, for a few extra pounds you can get the software LWCAD V3 with the new bundle (to buy this by itself is about £400), so as you can imagine I was a bit gutted, but used to this kind of thing as when ever I buy anything nice, it either gets updated with a new model or drops right down in price.  Anyway to cut a long story short the really nice lady at Newtek said that she would see if she could help me out as I bought my update so close to the new promotional deal.  I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t happen to me a lot and most companies don’t want to know me once they have my money, so I am really, really impressed by NewTek’s customer services and I already rated LightWave very highly.  I think NewTek have a customer for life with me.

  It was also my birthday this week, but been on call out for work this week I couldn’t even go for a birthday drink in case I got called out and I had to drive (I wont even have a single drink if I’m driving), but that’s okay when you get as old as me, you don’t want to celebrate your birthday that much and all the candles on the cake would be a huge fire hazard =)

Weekending 23/1/09

Lucky Seven:

  So what have I done on Lucky 7 this week?  Let’s see, I updated the web page for the game a bit and added a couple of wallpapers from the game, which I hope you like and download.  If nothing else, it will give you an idea for the overall look and feel for the game.

  I’ve also finished the little 2D icons for the Quest Mode Level Selection of the game, which to be honest, may change slightly once the rest of the style / theme of that screen has been finalised.  Most of them are animated to help the player understand what each one of them represents.  Actually each one of them represents a different rule or feature of the level which can be added to the level, so by just quickly looking at the icons, the player can get a good feel of the difficulty of the level.

  This is a rough mock up of the Quest Mode level selection.  It uses real in game graphics and is mainly just for Isaac and myself to work out the correct sizes and positions for everything.  Making sure that we are able to give the player enough information without cluttering up the screen or scaring the player off because it looks to complex, which in itself is harder then it seems as when you design something, you already know what everything does, so it already makes perfect sense to you, but a new, fresh pair of eyes will point out all the weaknesses in your design.

  Any way, Isaac has got all this in the game and has the basic foundations in so when you complete a level, it unlocks the surrounding levels for the player to try (which should allow the player to keep on playing without getting stuck on a level and make it really hard for us to get the difficulty level right as the player can and properly will go off in an unexpected direction).

  I guess I should explain a bit more about what you are looking at.  The top part is the basic level map where each block represents a level (the colours of the blocks also have a meaning).  You noticed that most of the blocks have a glass window effect around them, well this means that, that level is currently unavailable to the player and must be unlocked.  The blocks with the gold frames around them are special bonus rounds that will unlock / rewards the player.

  Isaac has been out of contact for most of the week as he has been away on a business trip, but knowing Isaac, he has found time to work on the game.

  Tommy has sent some sound effects for the game and they sound really good, and that’s without hearing them in the game, so when they are implemented into the game, they should really, really add to the game.

Shuffle Blocks:

  To be honest, I’ve not had any time to work on this game, but Dave and Tommy has.  Tommy has done a really nice tune for the game, which I listened to for well over 50 minutes  looped, without realising it, so it will be great for a word game where you don’t want to be distracted by an annoying tune.  It’s really nice.

  Dave has been busy with sick kids, trying to sort out a MAC development solution for himself and various code “house keeping” on Shuffle Blocks (which went way over my head when he was explaining it to me, but it will make the other games a lot easier to do and make new features for Shuffle Blocks a lot easier to do).

Well I’m falling a sleep at the keyboard again (which I’m going to use as my excuse for any spelling mistakes and mindless ramblings that I may have done in this post), so I’m calling it a night now (I am getting old after all).  Of course, if you have any questions feel free to add your comments and I’ll be more then happy to reply back.

So have a good week and I hope to see you next week

Thanks,

Mike.

www.badbumble.com

This entry was posted on 24/01/2009 at 12:13 am and is filed under Shuffle Blocks, Current Game Development, Lucky 7 Development Diary, Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.